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Agriculture | Country's first urine bank to come up at Musiri

Country's first urine bank to come up at Musiri

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published Published on Aug 11, 2011   modified Modified on Aug 11, 2011
-PTI
 
 
TIRUCHIRAPALLI: In an effort to use human urine as fertiliser, efforts to set up the country's first Human Urine Bank have been initiated at Musiri, about 35 km from here.

The initiative, a joint effort of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and Society for Community Organisation and People's Education (SCOPE), Musiri, was launched to help extraction of Struvite from urine. Struvite is a phosphate mineral that can be used as a fertiliser.

The Urine Bank, work on which was initiated on Feb 15, will be set up at Musiri taking advantage of the availability of processed urine in the Ecosan Community Compost Toilet (ECCT) and individual Ecosan toilets in the region, which were established some years ago.

The Ecosan toilets were set up to help turn faeces into manure and use urine as a fertiliser. About 300 litres of urine is collected per week at ECCTs in Musiri.

Subburaman, Director, SCOPE, said his organisation had completed 25 years of service in the field of sanitation and was launching the Urine Bank project during it silver jubilee year. "Urine contains vital nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, which can be used as a fertilisers", he said.

"These nutrients can be recovered from urine as Struvite by chemical precipitation and absorption. At present, the nutrient in millions of tonnes of urine available in the country every day is going waste since it is not collected separately", he said.

Launching the Urine Bank initiative, Sjoerd Nienhuys, Consultant of WASTE, a Netherlands-based NGO that was involved in the setting up of the ECCTs, said it was necessary to pursue alternative, cost-effective fuel the years to come in view of the rapid depletion of fossil fuel.

"The need of the hour is establishment of renewable energy-based fuel like biogas that will not cause any harm to the environment when meeting the requirements of the rapidly increasing population", he said.

Agreeing with his views, V Ganapathy, former journalist and advisor, Exnora, said, "Urine is used as liquid fertilizer in Sweden, Netherlands, Mexico, Germany, China".

He added that the feasibility of using urine as a fertiliser has been well-established in the farms of Musiri by the research programmes conducted by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, National Research Centre for Banana, WASTE of Netherlands and Department of Drinking Water Supply, Government of India, New Delhi.

As India is an importer of fertilisers, and the price of fertilisers is going up steeply, there is a need for exploring alternative nutrient sources such as human urine, he said.

For more details, visit http://www.scopetrichy.com
 
 

The Times of India, 18 February, 2011, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-02-18/india/28614510_1_fertiliser-initiative-nutrients


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